Keynote Speaker
Ray Kurzweil, described as “the restless genius” by the Wall Street Journal, and “the ultimate thinking machine” by Forbes, will be the keynote speaker at SC06.

Kurzeil’s keynote address will open the SC06 Technical Program on Tuesday, November 14, in the Tampa Convention Center. In it he will explain how the paradigm shift rate is doubling every decade, so the twenty-first century will see 20,000 years of progress at today’s rate. Computation, communication, biological technologies (for example, DNA sequencing), brain scanning, knowledge of the human brain, and human knowledge in general are all accelerating at an even faster pace, generally doubling price-performance, capacity, and bandwidth every year.

Kurzweill was the principal developer of the first CCD flat-bed scanner, the first omni-font optical character recognition, the first print-to-speech reading machine for the blind, the first text-to-speech synthesizer, the first music synthesizer capable of recreating the grand piano and other orchestral instruments, and the first commercially marketed large-vocabulary speech recognition.

Among Kurzweil’s many honors, he is the recipient of the MIT- Lemelson Prize. In 1999, he received the National Medal of Technology, the nation's highest honor in technology, from President Clinton in a White House ceremony. In 2002, he was inducted into the National Inventor's Hall of Fame, established by the U.S. Patent Office.
More information about his accomplishments can be found on his website.

Kurzweil has written five books, four of which have been national best sellers. “The Age of Spiritual Machines” has been translated into nine languages and was the #1 best selling book on Amazon.com in science. His latest book, “The Singularity is Near,” which went into its fourth printing after two months, was the fourth best-selling science book of 2005, according to Amazon.com.